Dodgers, Yesterday and Today

Ken Gurnick takes a stab at Dodger Opening Day Roster

Phil Gurnee ♦ February 11, 2019 ♦ 1 Comment

Cathers and pitchers report tomorrow so MLB had all their beat writers post who they thought would make the opening day rosters for each team. Ken Gurnick is the LAD beat writer for MLB and he gave it his best shot.

Injuries will surely change this educated guess but I do have some questions about some of the spots.

It does appear that Ken feels that Chris Taylor will be the starting second baseman even though Hernandez got more play at 2nd in the 2018 postseason. If you peruse through the box scores of the 2018 postseason you can see that Roberts wouldn’t commit to anyone giving starts to Hernandez, Muncy, Taylor, and Dozier. Dozier is gone but the other three still remain.  I’ll defer to the beat writer who should have some inside information on who the Dodgers are leaning toward but it would not surprise me in the least if Hernandez wins the 2nd base gig and Taylor is the super utility guy. When a left-hander is pitching I think we can safely say that all of Hernandez/Taylor/Freeze will be in the lineup but will Muncy/Bellinger/ Verdugo?

I guess the two notable players missing are Josh Fields and Dylan Floro. Ken has Caleb Ferguson and Julio Urias making the opening day roster but I would expect both of them to be pitching for OKC in their rotation and one of those spots going to Josh Fields.

Urias has to start and if he’s not starting in the Dodger rotation because the top five are all healthy I have to think it is a given he’s in AAA getting stretched out. Remember this is a guy who has barely pitched in two years and needs some innings. According to the Eric Stephen payroll spreadsheet, Urias still has one minor league option left.

Unless the Dodgers are completely committed to Caleb Ferguson as a relief artist I think he follows Urias to the OKC rotation. He still has three minor league options and can easily be optioned without any concerns.

The roster concern is if you don’t have either Urias or Ferguson you lost two left-handed relief pitchers because the pitchers who would replace them are probably right-handed. Unless Josh Fields isn’t healthy or completely shits the bed this spring he has to be one of the two. The only other left-hander on the 40 man roster is 25-year-old Adam McCreary who has one major league game under his belt. There is no help from the NRI list either as only one pitcher is left-handed (Josh Smoker).

I would agree that Urias and Ferguson, and probably even Dennis Santana are better than most of the pitchers on the projected 25 man roster, but teams don’t usually start the season with their best pitchers when they have minor league options that can be used to use them in situations that might be better for the team in the long run.

Anyway, that will be one of the interesting stories this spring for a team that is mainly without questions.

1. who will start at 2nd base or will it simply be like last Oct where everyone takes their turn?
2.  WIll Urias and/or Ferguson make the opening day roster instead of doing regular rotation turns for OKC?

Pipe dreams are just that until they aren’t

Phil Gurnee ♦ February 6, 2019 ♦ Leave a comment

It is possible that one year from now the Clipper starting team could have two of the five best players in basketball on it. Hopefully at least one.

The Clippers clobbered the trade deadline last night when they unloaded their best player for the second year in a row in an attempt to load up the team with two of AD / Leonard / Butler / Durant / Irving this coming summer. It was an even stranger trade for me given that I had just finished watching the Clippers beat the Hornets on a game-winning shot by Tobias Harris via the magic of DVR only to find out minutes later that he had just been traded.

Jovan Bova breaks down how it can work it.

The Clippers have the flexibility to either sign two superstars, sign one and trade for one, trade for two or roll over their cap space to 2020 or 2021, as they will not spend just to spend during the summer of 2019. They understand how attractive the Los Angeles market is to available players — roughly three-quarters of the league is in L.A. for some portion of the offseason — and want to maximize their advantage.

That link is to the Athletic so if you are not a subscriber you can’t read it so here is a link to Clipsnation which breaks down the deal in much the same way.

But really, this is about the free agency class of 2019: Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Kyrie Irving, and Jimmy Butler (and, to a lesser extent, Klay Thompson and Kemba Walker). The Clippers would not go all out like this, dumping a player whom they really like, and who would have been a reasonably plan B or C this summer, unless they had very high confidence in getting not one, but two superstars this summer.

Is this all a pipedream?

Maybe not

Clippers are very much part of all the good conversations these days. https://t.co/gQlPmRT7lv

— Mirjam Swanson (@MirjamSwanson) February 6, 2019

Mirjam was referring to this tweet by Woj

Adrian Wojnarowski: “And I think the Clippers, too, if [Kevin Durant] wants to stay on the West Coast. I don’t think he’ll go to the Lakers with LeBron [James].” pic.twitter.com/8EGbEowKmC

— Justin Russo (@FlyByKnite) February 6, 2019

While Durant has not said he would like to play for the Clippers, Anthony Davis, Leanord, and Butler are three superstars who while forcing their teams to trade them have included the Clippers as an ok landing spot, which is significant when they list very few teams.

Laker fans who continue to make fun of the Clippers (looking at you COOP) will laugh this off as a pipedream. They might be right, but if you remove the Clipper history and look at the now, you can see why these players might prefer the Clippers as their destination when they say they want to play in Los Angeles.

A prime time Lebron James was able to put together Wade and Bosh to make it happen in Miami but this Lebron is a very old basketball player. For the first time in his career, he had an injury and it took quite a while before he was back on the court. Going forward you can only expect more of the same. As much as an Iron Man he has been, you only have to remember that Kobe Bryant was also that Iron Man, until he wasn’t. The Lakers management doesn’t have Jerry West, the Clippers do. The Clippers also have the richest owner in all of sports. In time they will have their own arena, right where the Lakers used to win their Championships. Who would you trust to build the right team around you for a Championship run when one of the Max players is going to be 35 next year and 36 the year after that? The team that has Ballmer and  Jerry West who has already built multiple championships or the Buss family and Magic Johnson?

In the best case scenario for me, the Lakers get AD and team him up with Lebron. How they build the team around those two should be interesting. The Clippers sign Leonard, Durant, keep Shai and go from there.

Yeah, it is probably a pipe dream but for the first time it is a pipe dream that passes the sniff test, and that is heady stuff.

Finally a rule change I’m on board with

Phil Gurnee ♦ February 6, 2019 ♦ 2 Comments

When it comes to rule changes to speed up the game or add more offense I’ve often advocated that a pitcher must get at least one out before being lifted. I would have preferred that they have to get three outs but was willing to compromise on at least one out.

Out of the blue, it seems that MLB is now looking at implementing something between those two ideas. A pitcher must face at least three hitters per appearance.  MLB writer Mike Petriello brought this to my attention yesterday but I thought he was just running out his own thoughts.

The 3-batter minimum might kill the LOOGY. I think I can live with that. The flip side is that limiting the number of pitchers on a roster might help guys like Granderson get better deals; right now, there’s no room for a part-time platoon bat on a roster.

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) February 6, 2019

I didn’t know that MLB was actually considering it.

According to reports by The Athletic and ESPN, the specific rule-change proposals include:

The adoption of the designated hitter in the National League, making the DH universal across both leagues.

A rule requiring pitchers to face a minimum of three batters, except in the case of injury or when finishing an inning.

A 20-second pitch clock, a timesaving device Manfred has espoused for more than a year now.

A single trade deadline before the all-star break, to replace the traditional July 31 deadline and the Aug. 31 waiver-trade deadline.

The expansion of rosters from 25 to 26 players, with a maximum of 12 pitchers.

A reduction in mound visits from six to five.

A rule, which would be tested in spring training and the All-Star Game, in which each half-inning in extra innings would begin with a runner on second base.

Tweaks to the draft order to reward winning teams and penalize perennial losing teams

A rule that would permit two-sport athletes, such as Kyler Murray, to sign major league contracts as enticement to play baseball.

While I’ve been against the NL DH forever I would concede if it also meant the three batter rule.  Looking at all these rules I think the 20-second rule would be unnecessary if they implement the three batter per pitcher rule as that would be the biggest saving in time. I like the larger roster and the twelve man max pitcher roster.

I guess the only rule I’d really be against is starting the runner at 2nd in extra-innings. I guess they feel that fans don’t like extra-innings. My wife certainly does not, but I think real baseball fans enjoy extra-innings as each play gets magnified. This isn’t softball where you are playing under a time limit.

Black Water

Phil Gurnee ♦ January 26, 2019 ♦ 4 Comments

Yesterday, during my 650-mile one-way trip to visit my dementia-addled father to help as his caregiver while his real caregiver was undergoing surgery, the brain tends to wander towards thoughts that aren’t pleasant to contemplate. To help navigate the trip my Pandora station brought me song after song that I had harnessed over several years so that I basically had an eight hour trip of uninterrupted music that pleased the proper chords of my meandering brain.

It was a pleasant drive until the Doobie Brother classic “Black Water” came on and became the catalyst for one of my most pleasant memories.  The memory involved friends on a camping trip being driven by me in my new van, with a new girlfriend, singing Black Water but many of those voices have been silent for over 30 years even though it felt like just yesterday.

It was the summer of 1976, I had flown across the country to Virginia to buy and pick up my brothers’ van. It was a Blue Chevy Van that was a three on the tree with a middle seat built by my brother for his girlfriend to sit in next to the driver.  I drove the van across the country and arrived back in Los Angeles with a means of transportation that immediately had me ferrying folk around and thus was invited on a camping trip that I normally would not have been part of.  The trip was up to Little Rock Resivor and we ended up camping along a river.  The group included my new girlfriend who would become my first wife, my brother, his best friend Vance Faulker, another friend of my brothers named Chris Clark, Robert Raitt and his new wife Lori. I don’t remember much about the camping except for two things. The water was ice cold but my girlfriend loved it and was the only one who actually went swimming in the river, and they all got very drunk and stoned. My brother was the last to wake up the following morning so his “friends” were eating watermelon and spitting the seeds on his sleeping body.  I wasn’t part of this group, I was just the chauffeur. I was 17 and already going to college, and they were already a group of blue-collar folk who worked hard during the day and partied most every night.

None of them would have much of a future but on this trip for four minutes, I had as much fun as I’ve ever had driving. The drive back to Los Angeles after the trip was long for me as I wasn’t a very experienced driver. Lori took the middle seat next to me to keep me awake while everyone else was passed out on the two beds I (or my brother) had built into the back of the van. We were about an hour into the drive and I was sleepy as hell when the radio (probably KMET) started playing Black Water. Lori started singing and so I joined in. How could you not sing along with Black Water? The cool part though was one voice from the back of the van started singing, and then one by one everyone who had been passed out joined in so that by the time the song had hit “Yeah, I’d like to hear some funky Dixieland and dance a honky-tonk” the impromptu chorus was rocking the van. It was over in minutes but that moment has stayed with me forever and it is what I always think about when I hear Black Water.  Partly because of the memory and partly because some of those voices have been gone for a long long time.

Vance Faulker would leave Los Angeles and move to Needles where he could get stoned and not have to work. He was afraid to drive in Los Angeles but not in Needles but those nightmares he had as a kid of him dying in a car accident almost came true. He didn’t die but he was paralyzed in a car accident and a few years later died of pill overdose related to his paralysis.  Vance was probably between 25 – 27 when he died. Vance will get his own story because he was a fascinating man who I always thought of as the Natural because of his 6’4 frame and athletic ability.

Chris Clarke was run over while sleeping on the side of the road in Lancaster.  It is the end that surprised no one who knew him. Chris worked hard and partied harder. I didn’t know him well, not sure anyone did.

Robert Raitt would die of a heart attack but luckily his young wife Lori would make an improbable decision to those who knew her and divorce Robert a few years after the camping trip and marry our mutual friend Scott.  It was a decision I didn’t understand at the time, but she might have saved her life by ending her relationship with Robert.  She has been happily married to Scott for almost forty years and that story might blow your mind because it blew mine.

Anyway, Black Water was playing, and I did my best to pay homage to my old friends whose voices I hadn’t heard in forty years.

Old black water, keep on rollin’
Mississippi moon, won’t you keep on shinin’ on me?

Dodgers spend their winter getting older

Phil Gurnee ♦ January 26, 2019 ♦ 3 Comments

Losing  Farhan Zaidi might be more significant than I expected as the Dodgers have had the strangest winter since he became the Dodger General Manager on Nov 4th, 2014.

The Dodgers have made five significant moves this winter and each one has resulted in the Dodger twenty-five man roster getting older and whiter.

Yazmani Grandal was given a qualifying offer but declined it, and eventually signed a very friendly team deal with the Brewers. Grandal is thirty years old and was expected to sign at least a four year deal. That didn’t materialize for him so you’d think the Dodgers could have beaten the Brewer offer but instead the team the Dodgers barely beat in the NLCS  has upgraded their worst position and the Dodgers have downgraded as they wait for prospects to take over in the near future. Unless of course, they get Realmuto.

Second, they signed thirty-year-old relief pitcher Joe Kelly. This was a must sign, it didn’t have to be Joe Kelly but they badly needed a solid relief pitcher. Time will tell if they made the right choice in Joe Kelly. They didn’t with Tom Koehler last winter, but the investment in Koehler was minimal compared to the three-year deal they gave Kelly.

Thirdly they traded Yasiel Puig who will be entering his twenty-eight-year-old season. Along with Puig they threw in Alex Wood who will also be twenty-eight years old next season. Matt Kemp is the only person over 30 the Dodgers have traded this year.  They got back prospects but none of them will be seeing a major league roster until at least 2020.  This was a salary dump but it was also a value dump. They traded a state of the art fan favorite right fielder and solid rotation piece in Alex Wood just to clear money.  At first, it seemed the Dodgers were clearing room for Bryce Harper but that didn’t happen. Instead of signing the best free agent outfielder they signed the guy with significant health issues, and he didn’t come cheap.

To keep things rolling along for the over the hill gang, they traded prospects for Russell Martin who will be thirty-six-years-old next month and can no longer hit a breaking pitch.

The coup de grat, however, might have been signing an aging unhealthy when young A.J. Pollock to a multi-year deal. When it comes to rumors I look at the common sense side and since A. J. Pollock didn’t make sense given he was looking for a five year deal and the Dodgers “never” give out five year deals to position players I didn’t think the Dodger rumors were serious so I was surprised after being out of the news loop for a day to find out when I arrived at my brothers house last night that the Dodgers had signed A. J. Pollock. The terms seem reasonable five years at sixty million but as Eric Stephen points out,  A. J. Pollock seems like a weird choice to become the first positional Dodger in this management group to ink a five-year deal. 

While creative, the Pollock deal continues a Dodgers trend the last two offseasons of restraint. With an impact outfielder like Harper still unsigned, the Dodgers are swimming in the shallow end of the pool, content that the rest of the division is still using floaties.

Joc Pederson looks to be the next player under thirty to be traded this winter and it will probably be for players who won’t be on the major league roster.

I don’t think the Dodgers were specifically targeting to acquire white players and move non-white players but it was something my sister-in-law pointed out so fans are noticing.  Fans are also noticing that the roster as it stands today is not as good as the roster that ended the season, and that was only a 92 win team, not the juggernaut of 2017.

It is very possible that without  Farhan Zaidi the Dodgers just signed the first long term deal that they will regret long before the contract runs out. Not to mention the opportunity cost they may lose by not having the money to sign other players.

For the first time, I’ve lost some confidence that the front office knows what it is doing. This feels more like a Ned Colletti winter, and I was never comfortable with those.

Public Service Announcement

Phil Gurnee ♦ January 17, 2019 ♦ 3 Comments

A few years back I started to have problems driving a car for any period of time of over twenty minutes. My ass would hurt and pain would start shooting down my right leg to the point where any car travel was looked upon with trepidation.  I didn’t commute to work anymore but travel to downtown for the Dodgers or Clippers or other forms of entertainment meant I’d be in pain for quite a while before reaching the destination. Forget about making the 650-mile trip to see my Dad which I had been doing several times a year ever since they moved to Ferndale in 2006.

I tried numerous seat cushions but none of them brought relief. Doctor visit was just as futile. This went on for over a year when eight months ago I was helping my wife clean out her schoolroom when I noticed a round disk and asked her if I could try this as a seat cushion.

She said it wasn’t meant for sitting but for balance training but if I wanted to try it as a seat cushion, give it a shot,  so without any expectations, I used it on my office chair at home. An hour later I was feeling no pain in my ass or legs. Two hours later, no pain in my ass or legs. At home, I get up all the time but even so, this felt different. Trying to temper my excitement I took it to the truck and decided to go for a spin and see how it felt. Not sure how long I drove but at no point did my ass hurt, nor my legs.  I was starting to feel giddy but knew the big test would be the drive to Dodger Stadium in the Forerunner.  I picked a game and took off, and seventy-five minutes later I arrived at Dodger Stadium with a sore butt but no different than any butt would feel after seventy-five minutes.

There was no pain

I could once again drive without pain and so I made the plan to drive the 650 miles to see my Dad and family. I made it in the usual twelve hours and arrived in good shape. My life was back to normal. The funny part of this story is that when I told my brother about the disk, he said wait a minute and came back with the exact same product. He said he used it for balance. It is sold by Amazon as an Adult Sized Stability Wobble Cushion but I use it as a seat cushion and it has literally changed my life.

Some things stop working over time, but it has been eight months and as I make the plan to visit my Dad next week, I look forward to the drive instead of dreading it. This was a lucky find and I have no idea why this disk works for me but it does.

Woo Hoo